The room that had been allotted to Luke bore no resemblance to a hospital room, which was the single concession the PRD had made to Luke’s status, one he had leveraged immediately and without shame.

The walls were finished in pale stone, the floor in dark timber, and along the far side ran a full enchanted glass enclosure that opened the room entirely to the ocean, the glass panels curving outward into a wide balcony fitted with a low center table and sofas arranged to face each other and, incidentally, to face the door to his room directly.

The view beyond the balcony was the grey-green churn of the Gehenna Basin’s coastal water running to the horizon.

And on one of those sofas, Luke was sitting sideways with his legs thrown over the armrest and his head propped on one hand, staring at the sky beyond the glass ceiling, just like how he had been for the past several days.

Across from him, Naf sat cross-legged on the opposite sofa with a thick illustrated tome open across his knees, his blue eyes tracking the pages with the diligent focus of a twelve-year-old who had been told to read and had decided to take that very seriously, which was a decision Luke found personally offensive.

Beside Naf, tucked against the sofa’s far end with her silver hair loose over her shoulders, Irhaal had her eyes closed and her fingers moving in the slow, precise patterns of a sustained mana circulation exercise.

The faint blue current running through her hands was the only indication she was doing anything at all rather than simply existing in a state of highly attractive unconsciousness.

And on another sofa, Naya sat with a cup of tea held in both hands, her ocean-blue hair pinned back, and her priest’s white and gold attire as immaculate as it ever was, while her eyes moved between the door and Luke and then back to the door with unhidden judgmental attentiveness.

"You could read something," Naya said, without looking at Luke.

Luke looked at her with an offended face.

"You could sleep."

"Don’t wanna... every time I close my eyes I see MY Boomstick and how that man just took it!"

-Pfft-!

Naf immediately burst into a giggle, as his 12-year-old brain churned out the other way that sentence could’ve have been taken, and so did Luke after a pause.

"I walked into that one..." Luke chuckled at the giggling Naf before both of them caught Naya’s glare and immediately went into a coughing fit.

"You could do a circulation exercise." Naya turned to Luke.

"Irhaal’s breathing is already putting me to sleep, and I just told you every time I close my eyes... well."

Irhaal opened one eye, directed it at Luke with considerable precision, and then closed it again.

"You could..." Naf offered helpfully, without looking up from his book, "Ask Dr. Solenne to hurry up. She seemed polite and helpful."

Everyone in the room went quiet for a moment.

"Naf," Luke said.

"Yes?"

"She told me, and I am quoting directly, that my retaliatory ideation is currently my primary operational liability and that until I can demonstrate consistent affect regulation under controlled conditions, she will not be moving the evaluation timeline regardless of how many times I ask."

"Oh," Naf said, "And that means?"

"That means I cannot ask Dr. Solenne to hurry up."

"She said retaliatory ideation?" Naya asked, looking at him now.

"She said a lot of things." Luke pushed himself upright and dragged a hand through his hair. "And the worst part is most of them were accurate."

Irhaal opened both eyes. "Accurate how?"

"The part where she said my judgment produced a catastrophic operational outcome due to repeated procedural disregard was... in fact, pretty accurate." He said flatly because pretending it was not accurate would have been the kind of thing he did not do, even when the accurate version of events was deeply unpleasant to sit with.

"The part where she said," Luke continued, " I lack an adaptive framework for processing failure at scale was also accurate... I will be filing a complaint about the way she said it."

"To who?" Naya asked.

"I’m working on it."

Naf had lowered his book slightly and looked at Luke with the wide, earnest eyes, wanting to say something helpful, but didn’t know what to say.

Luke looked at him and said, "I’m fine, Naf."

"You say that every time."

"And every time I have meant it slightly more than the time before."

Naf held his gaze for another moment, searching it with the particular ability he had for reading people that went well beyond social intuition, and then he nodded and went back to his book, which was the version of acceptance Naf offered when he had decided to trust what he was told but was keeping the channel open.

And that’s when Luke heard it.

Footsteps in the corridor, heavy and familiar, and with the cadence of someone very large trying to walk casually and not succeeding.

The grin came before he had consciously decided to grin.

"Gorran is here!" Luke was off the sofa before the words even left his mouth.

And then the door opened, and Gorran filled the frame the way Gorran filled most frames, which was to say almost entirely and with a significant amount of visual authority.

He was in his off-duty gear, which for Gorran meant armor minus the outer plate.

He leaned into the room, looked left and right as though he had done something illegal, and was checking whether anyone official was in the room.

And was not good at it. He had never been good at it.

But then again, Garron had the face of a man constitutionally incapable of looking innocent, and this time around it worked in his favour.

"Finally," he said, with a fervor he usually reserved for moments of genuine tactical urgency.

Gorran walked to the balcony, reaching into the inner lining of his chest piece and pulled out a package wrapped tightly in brown paper.

"Last time," Gorran said, holding it out. "Security on this floor has two rotating shifts now, and the mana scanner at the eastern stairwell is the new model. I had to go around through the-"

Luke had already snatched it before Garron could even finish taking.

The wrapping came apart in his hands in approximately one second, revealing a pack of cigarettes, and he had the pack open in the next.

Pulling one out and held it beneath his nose and closed his eyes, and the expression on his face was as though he had just taken a whiff of the most fragrant flower in the universe.

And the very next instant, he was across the balcony and in front of Irhaal before anyone had even blinked.

"Irhaal," he said, eyes wide as he held the cigarette up. "Come on. Please."

Irhaal looked at the cigarette. Then at Luke. Then, at the ceiling, and let out a deep sigh that covered a considerable amount of ground emotionally before raising one finger, and the very next second, a small blue flame appeared at the tip.

Lighting up the cigarette, Luke took a long, deep pull, and exhaled, making a face of pure bliss as though he had just taken the first fresh breath in the past several days.

"Ah," he said softly. "Heaven."

The words had barely left his mouth when every hair on his body stood up simultaneously.

He could hear footsteps across the entire corridor.

And yet he heard none, and the door to his room just clicked.

In the entire organization, there was only one person who moved like that.

Luke vanished where he stood, reappearing in front of Gorran, and looked up at him with an expression of complete sincerity and honesty.

"Gorran, whatever happens, know this... You are my brother, and I would die for you."

Gorran blinked down at him, and before he could even begin to process it, Luke placed the cigarette carefully between Gorran’s lips, reappeared on the sofa, picked up his teacup, crossed one leg over the other, and arranged his expression into one of composure and restfulness.

Everyone on the balcony had about one second to register what had happened before the door opened.

And Lady Strelitzia walked in.

And the room did what rooms always did when she walked in unannounced, which was to produce an immediate and involuntary stillness in everyone present, the kind that bypassed decision-making and went directly to the part of the brain that handled the concept of things significantly larger and older and more powerful than anything you know entering the immediate vicinity.

Naf’s book lowered fully to his knees. Naya set her teacup down without a sound. And Irhaal’s circulation exercise stopped.

Lady Strelitzia’s red slit eyes moved across the room in a single, unhurried sweep that missed nothing, settling briefly on the sofa where Luke was sitting with his teacup, and then moved to the balcony, where Gorran stood frozen stiff with a lit cigarette between his lips.

The poor man looked at the cigarette.

Then looked at Lady Strelitzia.

Looked at the cigarette again.

Then his eyes found Luke on the sofa.

And Luke winced, and the wince was sincere.

Gorran’s knees, which had held against the full brunt of Nom-Nom’s dragon fire, just gave way.

-Thud.

He went down like a massive golem that had abruptly ceased to function, the cigarette still between his lips, eyes rolled back, unconscious before he even hit the floor.

While Luke was already off the sofa, already moving to the open space before Lady Strelitzia, already dropping to one knee with one hand on his back and one hand flat over his heart, head lowered, just as the tradition demanded.

"Greetings, Master," he said.

Then, with a timing that fooled absolutely no one in the room, he added a small cough. A delicate, faintly distressed cough as though he couldn’t take the stench.

Both Naya and Irhaal stared at him with expressions that stated, ’Told you it was a bad idea.’

Naf looked at Gorran on the floor, and then at Luke, and then at Gorran again, and his expression was the one that reflected he had understood the situation completely and really wished that he hadn’t.

Lady Strelitzia looked at all of them before speaking just two words.

"Clear the room."

Naya and Irhaal immediately moved to Gorran, each taking a shoulder before carrying him between them and walking out at the fastest pace their legs could muster, while Naf jogged behind them, clicking the door shut as they went out.

While Luke remained kneeling.

Lady Strelitzia walked to the sofa, sat, looked at the balcony where the ocean moved in the distance, and said, "Open the windows."

"There are no windows, Master," Luke said, keeping his head down. "To prevent patients from escaping... just in case..."

"Hm," she said.

And the wave of concussion that followed was so precise and so complete that Luke felt nothing of it on his skin from where he knelt, but the enchanted glass enclosing the entire balcony, the panels rated against sustained assault from multiple Tier 7 practitioners, dissolved into fine white dust in the same instant the sound reached him, bringing in the ocean air in a single clean rush.

Luke did not even feel her use mana.

"Sit."

Luke rose from his knee and jogged to the table, removing the used teacups from the surface before setting a fresh cup, pouring from the pot that had been sitting on the warmer, placing it before his master, then sitting on the opposite sofa, hands on his knees, back straight, not touching the backrest.

The lingering ghost of nicotine was rapidly replaced by the far less pleasant sensation of realizing his master had not come here just to see how her only disciple was doing.

"Did you read the report I sent you?" she asked, picking up the cup.

"Yes, Master."

"What do you think?"

Luke looked at her directly and said, without hesitation, "I believe he is the Destined Hero. Not the Demon God."

"Your basis."

"Instinct," he said, with complete seriousness. "I understand the report’s analysis rests on the inventory discrepancy, the Chronos Protocol not being capable of storing naval vessels of that scale, and that the Demon God’s System carries no such limitation. But when I was in front of him, when I was close enough to feel his mana and read his movement and watch the decisions he made... Something in it does not fit the Demon God. It is all based on feeling. Hence I am unable to produce a logic for it."

She held the cup and said nothing, eyes still at the ocean.

"Master," Luke said, half a beat later. "May I ask something?"

"Hm."

"Destined Hero or Demon God, regardless of which he truly is, we now know with certainty the Cycle of Regression has begun." He watched her face as he said it, which told him nothing, which was itself a form of information. "So... what is our current stance on the Summoned Heroes?"

Her eyes snapped at him.

"How much do you know?"

Though her voice was the same as it always was, but the attention behind it had sharpened by a degree that made his scalp prickle.

Luke scratched the back of his scalp with one hand and chuckled sheepishly before eventually taking a deep breath and admitting that-

"I know the Kingdom of Zephyria has located an ancient ritual dating back to the First Age," he said. "It supposedly allows the summoning of Heroes from a realm beyond our own. Even multiple at once... each capable of altering the balance of the world itself."